Year in review

2024 followed a year in which Hollywood experienced a once-in-a-generation work stoppage. So it’d be hard to designate 2024 as “unprecedented” or “seismic” or any of the lofty labels typically affixed in retrospect when trying to surmise the magnitude of a year. With that said, 2024 made a solid case for its place in the history book of the TV, streaming and digital video industry.

Here are the developments that I think the year will be most remembered for.

The year of TV’s corporate restructuring

Of course, Warner Bros. Discovery is closing 2024 by restructuring its operations in a way that would seem to allow the company to sell or spin off its traditional TV networks. After all, it was the year that TV companies directly confronted their sagging legacy businesses.

Over the summer, Paramount and WBD wrote down the values of their respective cable TV networks by billions of dollars. Then last month, Comcast decided to spin off the majority of its cable TV networks into a separate company altogether. And then last week, WBD announced it is splitting its traditional TV networks into a separate division from its streaming and studios operations, which would appear to be a step toward mirroring Comcast’s move.

Paramount, meanwhile, was an early mover to what appears to be a swelling M&A wave. CBS’s parent company was sold to Skydance Media in a deal that won’t close until sometime next year. In a deal that did close this year, Walmart bought TV maker and connected TV platform owner Vizio, which could indicate a banner year in 2025 for the CTV platform market if Roku ends up being acquired as some analysts are suggesting, and depending on what comes of The Trade Desk’s bid to stand up a CTV platform.

The year sports went streaming

Ask any New Year’s resolution-maker, and the start of the year doesn’t always portend the remaining months. But with respect to streaming sports, it did.

NBCUniversal’s Peacock opened 2024 in January by hosting the first NFL playoff game to be available exclusively via streaming (excepting the local TV broadcasts). In February, Disney, Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery unveiled the formation of a joint venture called Venu to pool their sports programming into a standalone streaming service. Then over the summer, Amazon Prime Video snagged rights to stream NBA games away from WBD and its TNT cable TV network. And to fittingly end the year, Netflix will stream two NFL games on Christmas Day.

With all of that being said, like any heralded rookie, streaming sports is still finding its groove. Venu, for example, was supposed to launch this year but was postponed after streaming pay-TV provider Fubo filed a lawsuit claiming the Disney-Fox-WBD-backed streamer would harm competition. And Netflix’s livestream of the Mike Tyson-Jake Paul boxing match got a lot of attention, not just for the fight itself but for its technical issues.

The year of the streaming ad correction

January portended the year ahead for the streaming ad market as well. That month, Amazon Prime Video rolled out its ad-supported tier, which opted in existing subscribers by default. Effectively overnight, the e-commerce giant inflated the amount of streaming ad inventory on the market and kicked off a streaming ad price correction.

For the past few years, streaming ad buyers have suffered sticker shock as the likes of WBD’s Max, Netflix and Disney’s Disney+ set sky-high CPMs for their nascent ad-supported tiers. This year those rates fell to earth a bit during the annual upfront ad-buying cycle.

The primary reason for those price drops is the growth in streaming ad inventory has outpaced advertiser demand. That’s not to say that streaming ad impressions aren’t in demand by advertisers, but in addition to Netflix et al. expanding their ad-supported audiences, many streamers have signed distribution deals to make their ad-supported services available as part of broader bundles, such as Disney’s pact with WBD to package Disney+, Hulu and Max.

The year generative AI came to video

Technically, generative AI came to video last year with all those AI-generated Wes Anderson sendups. But this year, the technology came to Hollywood as well as Madison Avenue.

In February, OpenAI announced Sora, a text-to-video generative AI tool that was not the first of its kind but was to be the first from the company that made genAI a mainstream concern. ChatGPT’s parent company then started taking the technology out to film and TV studios in the spring and finally released it to the public just last week.

Companies and creators will want to take care before exchanging cameras for chat prompts, though. Creators have begun to incorporate gen AI tools into their video workflows. But they are primarily doing so outside of their actual videos, such as in helping to brainstorm titles and thumbnails, which may be for the best given some audience members’ negative sentiments around the technology. Toys “R” Us and Coca-Cola showed how polarizing AI-generated videos can be with their respective AI-generated ad campaigns.

The last year of TikTok?

If TikTok features in the 2025 year-in-review, its role may be summed up as “thanks to the opening created by TikTok’s ban in the U.S.”

After years of government threats to block the video platform’s availability in the country, in April, Congress passed and President Joseph Biden signed a law to force parent company ByteDance to sell TikTok or have it be banned in the U.S. The presidential election ended up overshadowing the order, and Donald Trump’s election raised the question of whether he would overturn it once in office. But before he may have that chance, a federal appeals court rejected TikTok’s attempt to have the law dismissed.

That leaves TikTok set to be sold by Jan. 19 or banned, and leaves open the question of what effect that may have on short-form rivals YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels, not to mention the broader video landscape. But we’ll cover that after the holidays in the 2025 preview edition of the Future of TV Briefing. Have a great end to the year.

What we’ve heard

“Our new corporate structure better aligns our organization and enhances our flexibility with potential future strategic opportunities across an evolving media landscape.”

— Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav in a press release announcing the company’s restructuring

Numbers to know

73%: Percentage share of U.S. teens who said they use YouTube daily, compared to 57% for TikTok and 50% for Instagram.

$82.5 million: How much money BuzzFeed will receive for the sale of First We Feast, including its “Hot Ones” franchise.

$82.99: The monthly price for a subscription to YouTube TV, starting in January.

~260: Estimated number of employees that Nexstar Media is laying off.

What we’ve covered

Creators are left wanting more from Spotify’s push to video:

• Last month, Spotify announced new video features for creators, including an updated ad revenue-sharing program.
• The number of creators posting videos to the platform has increased by more than 50% in the past year.

Read more about Spotify here.

What we’re reading

Warner Bros. Discovery’s trial separation:

Less than three years after forming the merger of WarnerMedia and Discovery, WBD is dividing itself in two, with one division for its traditional TV networks and another for its streaming and studios business, likely in anticipation of eventually spinning or selling off the former, according to the Financial Times.

LinkedIn’s TikTok clone:

Years after YouTube and Instagram aped the predominant short-form vertical video platform, the Microsoft-owned business-centric social network has done the same, and some creators are seeing their videos outperform text and photo posts on the platform, according to Business Insider.

CNBC+:

Normally I’d joke that a company planning to launch a standalone streaming service will dub it with a “+” suffix, but no, CNBC is actually using that nomenclature for the streamer it’ll introduced in Q1 2025, according to Variety.